Humans And Animals Quotes

Spirituality, for someone like me who doesn't believe in God, in the existence of soul, in something after-death, is the capacity to love and to understand others – humans, and animals – is the capacity to not do to others what you don't want other people to do to you. ~ Margherita Hack

The entire cosmos is a cooperative. The sun, the moon, and the stars live together as a cooperative. The same is true for humans and animals, trees, and the Earth. When we realize that the world is a mutual, interdependent, cooperative enterprise
then we can build a noble environment. If our lives are not based on this truth, then we shall perish. ~ Buddhadasa

Vegan is just pure love. Love for animals, love for the planet, and love for yourself. ~ Mischa Temaul

Permaculture creates a cultivated ecology, which is designed to produce more human and animal food than is generally found in nature. ~ Bill Mollison

In Connecticut, for example, a man confessed to having had sexual relations with a variety of animals since the age of ten; Massachusetts executed several teenage boys for buggery. Sexual relations with animals required harsh punishment, for colonists believed that these unions could have reproductive consequences. The mating of humans and animals, they feared, would produce monstrous offspring. For this reason, colonists insisted on punishing not only the man but also the beast, who might bear such monsters. ~ John D'Emilio

and much of what she came to understand was that humans were domestic animals like dogs and cats. They responded poorly to threats and well to a gentle building of trust. ~ James S.A. Corey

Animation is different from other parts. Its language is the language of caricature. Our most difficult job was to develop the cartoon's unnatural but seemingly natural anatomy for humans and animals. ~ Walt Disney

May the animals be blessed. Today I remember the animals of the world, our cohabitants of this precious planet. I recognize their vulnerability, as well as the harm we sometimes do to them. May careless, even cruel behavior toward animals be forever removed from the earth. May my heart be open to ways I can be of service to them. May the relationship between humans and animals be lifted to its highest place. Dear God, Please bless the animals. Protect them From the actions of those with cold hearts. May we be proper stewards Of these precious creations in our midst. Amen. ~ Marianne Williamson

And this is precisely where the tension lies: Panthera tigris and Homo sapiens are actually very much alike, and we are drawn to many of the same things, if for slightly different reasons. Both of us demand large territories; both of us have prodigious appetites for meat; both of us require control over our living space and are prepared to defend it, and both of us have an enormous sense of entitlement to the resources around us. If a tiger can poach on another's territory, it probably will, and so, of course, will we. A key difference, however, is that tigers only take what they need. ~ John Vaillant

So far, we have no good answer to this problem. Already thousands of years ago philosophers realised that there is no way to prove conclusively that anyone other than oneself has a mind. Indeed, even in the case of other humans, we just assume they have consciousness – we cannot know that for certain. Perhaps I am the only being in the entire universe who feels anything, and all other humans and animals are just mindless robots? Perhaps I am dreaming, and everyone I meet is just a character in my dream? Perhaps I am trapped inside a virtual world, and all the beings I see are merely simulations?
According to current scientific dogma, everything I experience is the result of electrical activity in my brain, and it should therefore be theoretically feasible to simulate an entire virtual world that I could not possibly distinguish from the 'real' world. Some brain scientists believe that in the not too distant future, we shall actually do such things. Well, maybe it has already been done – to you? For all you know, the year might be 2216 and you are a bored teenager immersed inside a 'virtual world' game that simulates the primitive and exciting world of the early twenty-first century. Once you acknowledge the mere feasibility of this scenario, mathematics leads you to a very scary conclusion: since there is only one real world, whereas the number of potential virtual worlds is infinite, the probability that you happen to inhabit the sole real world is almost zero. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

I think locality exercises strange influence over some minds. The peaceful meadow-scenery holds no lurking horrors in its bosom, but in the lonesome moorlands, full of curiously molded boulders, grotesque fancies must assail one there. Creatures seem to come, odd and ill-defined as their surroundings. As a child I had a peculiar horror of those tall, odd-shaped boulders, with seeming faces, featureless, it is true, but sometimes strangely resembling humans and animals. I believe the spinney may be haunted by something of this nature, terrible as the trees. ("The Haunted Spinney") ~ Elliott O'Donnell

'Everything beautiful occurs when the body / is suspended,' Helena Mesa quotes a performance artist who hangs his own pierced body in the air. Mesa's poems are artfully suspended between lyric and narrative, between humans and animals, between Latin America and the U.S., between desire and the difficulty of its fulfillment. Horse Dance Underwater is an inventive, musical, and powerful debut. ~ Mark Doty

Even if we ourselves are not personally scandalized by the notion of other animals as close relatives, even if our age has accommodated to the idea, the passionate resistance of so many of us, in so many epochs and cultures, and by so many distinguished scholars, must say something important about us. What can we learn about ourselves from an apparent error so widespread, propagated by so many leading philosophers and scientists, both ancient and modern, with such assurance and self-satisfaction?

One of several possible answers: A sharp distinction between humans and "animals" is essential if we are to bend them to our will, make them work for us, wear them, eat them--without any disquieting tinges of guilt or regret. With untroubled consciences, we can render whole species extinct--for our perceived short-term benefit, or even through simple carelessness. Their loss is of little import: Those beings, we tell ourselves, are not like us. An unbridgeable gap gas thus a practical role to play beyond the mere stroking of human egos. Darwin's formulation of this answer was: "Animals whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equals. ~ Carl Sagan

Movements for animal rights are not irrational denials of human uniqueness; they are a clear-sighted recognition of connection across the discredited breach of nature and culture. Biology and evolutionary theory over the last two centuries have simultaneously produced modern organisms as objects of knowledge and reduced the line between humans and animals to a faint trace re-etched in ideological struggle or professional disputes between life and social science. Within this framework, teaching modern Christian creationism should be fought as a form of child abuse. ~ Donna J. Haraway

For humans and animals alike, truly vigorous, wholehearted, spontaneous play is something of a biological frill. ~ Robin Marantz Henig

All the human and animal manure which the world wastes, if returned to the land, instead of being thrown into the sea, would suffice to nourish the world. ~ Victor Hugo

The organs of our own bodies, arms, hands, lungs, kidneys function as a cooperative in order to survive. Humans and animals and trees and the earth are interwoven, integrated as a cooperative. Awakening beyond our self-interest, we find a natural ecology of mind and nature, fresh, open, joyful where we are organically connected with all things. ~ Ajhan Buddhadasa

Humans - who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other animals - have had an understandable penchant for pretending animals do not feel pain. A sharp distinction between humans and 'animals' is essential if we are to bend them to our will, make them work for us, wear them, eat them - without any disquieting tinges of guilt or regret. It is unseemly of us, who often behave so unfeelingly toward other animals, to contend that only humans can suffer. The behavior of other animals renders such pretensions specious. They are just too much like us. ~ Carl Sagan

There is increasing social concern about our use of nonhumans for experiments, food, clothing and entertainment. This concern about animals reflects both our own moral development as a civilization and our recognition that the differences between humans and animals are, for the most part, differences of degree and not of kind. ~ Gary L. Francione

The morphic fields include all kinds of organizing fields ... : The organizing fields of animal and human behaviour, of social and cultural systems, and of mental activity can all be regarded as morphic fields which contain an inherent memory. ~ Rupert Sheldrake

Earth allows several levels for Soul to gain experience in life, including the mineral, plant, fish, animal and human stages. ~ Harold Klemp

American scientific companies are cross-breeding humans and animals and coming up with mice with fully functioning human brains. ~ Christine O'Donnell

Animals and humans come in many different sizes and colors, but we all have the same loving heart and soul. ~ Anthony D. Williams

When animals behave like humans or when humans behave like animals, don't be surprised because in every animal there is a human and in every human there is an animal! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

If you're reading this book, you're probably already interested in being green, and almost certainly already a parent (or about to become one), so I won't trouble too much with the semantics of what 'being green' means, but just say that doing the 'green' thing here means being as environmentally friendly as possible, while considering your child's everyday personal health as well, and taking into account social-justice issues to some degree, because no-one is an island and humans and animals are part of the environment too. Even if you're new to this, it's entirely
possible, with a little helping hand, to form new, green lifestyle habits, so long as you're prepared to take baby steps to begin with (and pardon the pun). ~ Zion Lights

All the complex wires of life were stripped out and he could see the structure of life. Nothing but rock and sea, the tiny figures of humans and animals against them for a brief time. ~ Annie Proulx

Your righteousness is like the mighty mountains, your judgments are like the great deep; you save humans and animals alike, O LORD. ~ Anonymous

Two of the many areas of conflict between Judeo-Christian values and leftism concern the separation between the holy and the profane and the separation between humans and animals. ~ Dennis Prager

Humans and animals regard each other across a gulf of mutual incomprehension. With aliens, that has to go double. ~ Gregory Benford

Faced with an ecological crisis whose roots lie in this disengagement, in the separation of human agency and social responsibility from the sphere of our direct involvement with the non-human environment, it surely behoves us to reverse this order of priority. I began with the point that while both humans and animals have histories of their mutual relations, only humans narrate such histories. But to construct a narrative, one must already dwell in the world and, in the dwelling, enter into relationships with its constituents, both human and non-human. I am suggesting that we rewrite the history of human-animal relations, taking this condition of active engagement, of being-in-the-world, as our starting point. We might speak of it as a history of human concern with animals, insofar as this notion conveys a caring, attentive regard, a 'being with'. And I am suggesting that those of us who are 'with' animals in their day-to-day lives, most notably hunters and herdsmen, can offer us some of the best possible indications of how we might proceed. ~ Tim Ingold

Saving the biosphere depends first and foremost on human beings reaching mutual understanding and unforced agreement as to common ends. And that intersubjective accord occurs only in the noosphere. Anything short of that noospheric accord will continue to destroy the biosphere. ~ Ken Wilber

The Japanese scientists just found a 25,000-year-old mammoth in the ice in Siberia, and they're about to clone it ... You think the Japanese of all people would want nothing to do with prehistoric animals after what happened with Godzilla. ~ Greg Giraldo

Men are the only animals that devote themselves, day in and day out, to making one another unhappy. It is an art like any other. Its virtuosi are called altruists. ~ H.L. Mencken

There are as many kinds of missionaries as there are human beings. There are the terrible, colonialist power-grabbers, still, and there are plenty of the sort of well-intentioned villains who do great harm and don't understand that they are doing great harm. ~ Kyle Minor

In however complex a manner this feeling may have originated, as it is one of high importance to all those animals which aid and defend one another, it will have been increased through natural selection; for those communities, which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members, would flourish best, and rear the greatest number of offspring. ~ Charles Darwin

All that has been done to weaken the foundation of an implicit faith in the Bible, as a whole, has been at the expense of the sense of religious obligation, and at the cost of human happiness. ~ J.G. Holland

I should say tact was worth much more than wealth as a road to leadership ... I mean that subtle apprehension which teaches a person how to do and say the right thing at the right time. It coexists with very ordinary qualities, and yet many great geniuses are without it. Of all human qualities I consider it the most convenient
not always the highest; yet I would rather have it than many more shining qualities. ~ M. E. W. Sherwood

But strength doesn't always mean brute force. You don't have to kick ass to be a fighter. Violence doesn't equal strength. Lead your army by example. There's a better answer to all this. War isn't going to solve anything, but it will tear our two worlds apart, and there will be casualties, including humans. There's nothing heroic about this war. It will lead to a destruction unlike anything you or I have ever seen ~ Becca Fitzpatrick

I do remember how it was to be poor. I do remember that in my early years, we had to grow and raise all of our food, even our animals. And I remember in my early life, we didn't even have electricity. So it was very, very hard times then. ~ Dolly Parton

When I hear about someone else's pain, I feel pain too. i feel pain for everything - for people and animals. ~ Dmitri Shostakovich

We humans can work hard for each other, and we should and we must work. But it is God, and only God, who heals. The Cross and the Switchblade, pg 90. ~ David Wilkerson

Compassion, in which all ethics must take root, can only attain its full breadth and depth if it embraces all living creatures and does not limit itself to mankind. ~ Albert Schweitzer

The greatest ability in the whole human race and all amongst the livingness, is the ability to help. And when you can improve that ability all the way up along the line, you've improved about all there is to improve about a person. ~ L. Ron Hubbard

Critics are a kind of freebooters in the republic of letters
who, like deer, goats and divers other graminivorous animals, gain subsistence by gorging upon buds and leaves of the young shrubs of the forest, thereby robbing them of their verdure, and retarding their progress to maturity. ~ Washington Irving

Somewhere along the line the American love affair with wilderness changed from the thoughtful, sensitive isolationism of Thoreau to the bully, manly, outdoorsman bravado of Teddy Roosevelt. It is not for me, as an outsider, either to bemoan or celebrate this fact, only to observe it. Deep in the male American psyche is a love affair with the backwoods, log-cabin, camping-out life.

There is no living creature here that cannot, in its right season, be hunted or trapped. Deer, moose, bear, squirrel, partridge, beaver, otter, possum, raccoon, you name it, there's someone killing one right now. When I say hunted, I mean, of course, shot at with a high-velocity rifle. I have no particular brief for killing animals with dogs or falcons, but when I hear the word 'hunt' I think of something more than a man in a forage cap and tartan shirt armed with a powerful carbine. In America it is different. Hunting means 'man bonding with man, man bonding with son, man bonding with pickup truck, man bonding with wood cabin, man bonding with rifle, man bonding above all with plaid'. ~ Stephen Fry

I was asleep for almost ten years. And then this big goober with all these fucking weird animals moved into my house, and I was suddenly awake. ~ Amy Lane

Running is a brutal and emotional sport. It's also a simple, primal sport. As humans, on a most basic level, we get hungry, we sleep, we yearn for love, we run. ~ Adharanand Finn

Why wouldn't I help? What good reason do I have as a human being with power and a sense of empathy and morality, why wouldn't I do something? ~ John Legend

The American people cannot close their eyes to abuses of human rights and injustice, whether they occur among friend or adversary or even on our own shores. ~ Ronald Reagan

They were once fairies and elves. Now they are creatures from beyond the stars because you no longer believe in anything but humans. ~ Thomm Quackenbush

Every wedding must be an occasion of joy that human beings can do such great things, that they have been given such immense freedom and power to take the helm in their life's journey ... ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

We have enough space in our hearts, but we are afraid of allowing animals shit and mess around with our feelings. ~ Michael Bassey Johnson

In a letter (no matter how quickly it is written or honestly or freely or lovingly) it is more possible to be loving and lovable, more possible to reach out and to take in ... I feel I have somehow deceived you into thinking this is really a human relationship. It is a letter relationship between humans ... ~ Anne Sexton

Casals says music fills him with the wonder of life and the 'incredible marvel' of being a human. Ives says it expands his mind and challenges him to be a true individual. Bernstein says it is enriching and ennobling. To me, that sounds like a good cause for making music and the arts an integral part of every child's education. Studying music and the arts elevates children's education, expands students' horizons, and teaches them to appreciate the wonder of life. ~ Richard Riley

He understood and accepted that humans were basically ridiculous. ~ Nora Roberts

When you adopt the standards and the values of someone else ... you surrender your own integrity. You become, to the extent of your surrender, less of a human being. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

To understand my feelings - and my conception of the role of Secretary General - the nature of my religious and cultural background must first be understood. I should therefore like to outline not only my beliefs but also my conception of human institutions and of the human situation itself. ~ U Thant

We have raised an issue that is already in the Bolivian constitution, that water is a universal human right. And we asked the United Nations to recognize water as a human right. ~ Evo Morales

If human lives be,
for their very brevity, sweet,
then beast lives are sweeter still ... ~ Isobelle Carmody

No matter what God's power may be, the first aspect of God is never that of the absolute Master, the Almighty. It is that of the God who puts himself on our human level and limits himself. ~ Jacques Ellul

My father is a college professor and that's about the extent of my college experience. I'm sort of a professional student forever. I think just as human beings we always have a student who is alive in us and is waiting to pop up and make us feel like we are 16 years-old again. ~ Gabriel Mann

Parsons always seem to be specially horrified about things like sunbathing and naked bodies. They don't mind poverty and misery and cruelty to animals nearly as much. ~ Susan Ertz

It is a truism, of course, that in "democratic" states the populace must be encouraged to imagine that it makes important decisions by voting, and must therefore be controlled by suitable propaganda, which implants ideas to which the voters respond as automatically as trained animals respond to words of command in a circus, thus leaving to the masses only a factitious choice between Tweedledum and Tweedledee on the basis of their preference for a certain kind of oratory, a hair-style, or a particular facial expression. ~ Revilo P. Oliver

As graduation loomed, I had a nagging sense that there was still far too much unresolved for me, that I wasn't done studying. I applied for a master's in English literature at Stanford and was accepted into the program. I had come to see language as an almost supernatural force, existing between people, bringing our brains, shielded in centimeter-thick skulls, into communion. A word meant something only between people, and life's meaning, its virtue, had something to do with the depth of the relationships we form. It was the relational aspect of humans - i.e., "human relationality" - that undergirded meaning. Yet somehow, this process existed in brains and bodies, subject to their own physiologic imperatives, prone to breaking and failing. There must be a way, I thought, that the language of life as experienced - of passion, of hunger, of love - bore some relationship, however convoluted, to the language of neurons, digestive tracts, and heartbeats. At Stanford, I had the good ~ Paul Kalanithi

The divine is at the edge of our awareness and vision, but it is also within us as the first seeker found when all seemed lost completely. In order to find the dream of life again, we must first find the way that the dream exists within our own souls. We may be daunted by the surfacing of all the dilemmas and trouble of this troubled world, but the deep self and soul within us already knows how we are intended to swim in the blessed turmoil of the waters of life. For humans exist to bring meaning to the surface of life and awareness to the dream of existence. ~ Michael Meade

We must recognise - both Muslims and non- Muslims, that the Koran is a text. We need human engagement with that text, so we have to understand that the rulings and the legal rulings are produced are channelled through the human mind, it's an interpretive act of a human being engaging and interacting with a text producing legal results. Because of that it's susceptible to flaws, it is not perfect. Nobody has perfect access to the divine will. ~ Mark Durie

In every known culture,
humans experience joy, sadness, disgust, anger, fear, and surprise. In every
known culture, these emotions are indicated by the same facial expressions.
This empirical observation, which is predicted and mandated by the
structural logic of evolution, is known as the psychic unity of mankind. (I
prefer the term "psychological unity of humankind," but I didn't invent it.) ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky

Day and night she had drudged and struggled and thrown her soul into her work, and there was not much of her left over for anything else. Being human, she suffered from this lack and did what she could to make up for it. If she passed the evening bent over a table in the library and later declared that she had spent that time playing cards, it was as though she had managed to do both those things. Through the lies, she lived vicariously. The lies doubled the little of her existence that was left over from work and augmented the little rag end of her personal life. ~ Carson McCullers

The girl wondered: These policemen ... didn't they have families, too? Didn't they have children? Children they went home to? How could they treat children this way? Were they told to do so, or did they act this way naturally? Were they in fact machines, not human beings? She looked closely at them. They seemed of flesh and bone. They were men. She couldn't understand. ~ Tatiana De Rosnay

It's better not to hold your feelings inside too much and express them to a dear one freely, than to pay thousands of dollars to a psychiatrist for the same outburst of emotions later. Emotions are a bonding mechanism for humans. So, use 'em, abuse 'em and utilize 'em. ~ Abhijit Naskar

The water wasn't the same down here.

Water is what runs out of the kitchen taps or a playground drinking fountain. It fills bathubs and pools and yes, of course, the ocean- but at a certain depth, water becomes a barrier from all you remember, all you think you know.

You're trapped within it, a plaything of it.

Focus erodes. Your thoughts mutate. The pressure.

The pressure.

The soul can't cope with that. It shouldn't be expected to.

Humans weren't built for this. There's a reason nothing lives down here.

Or nothing should. ~ Nick Cutter

I could scream down 90 mountains
to less than dust
if only one living human had eyes in the head
and heart in the body,
but there is no chance,
my god,
no chance.
rat with rat dog with dog hog with hog,
play the piano drunk
listen to the drunk piano,
realize the myth of mercy
stand still
as even a child's voice snarls
and we have not been fooled,
it was only that we wanted to believe. ~ Charles Bukowski

Home, like love, hate, war, and peace, is one of those words that is so important that it doesn't need more than one syllable. Home is part of the fabric of who humans are. Doesn't matter if you're a vampire or a wizard or a secretary or a schoolteacher; you have to have a home, even if only in principle - there has to be a zero point from which you can make comparisons to everything else. Home tends to be it. ~ Jim Butcher

We line up and make a lot of noise about big environmental problems like incinerators, waste dumps, acid rain, global warming and pollution. But we don't understand that when we add up all the tiny environmental problems each of us creates, we end up with those big environmental dilemmas. Humans are content to blame someone else, like government or corporations, for the messes we create, and yet we each continue doing the same things, day in and day out, that have created the problems. Sure, corporations create pollution. If they do, don't buy their products. If you have to buy their products (gasoline for example), keep it to a minimum. Sure, municipal waste incinerators pollute the air. Stop throwing trash away. Minimize your production of waste. Recycle. Buy food in bulk and avoid packaging waste. Simplify. Turn off your TV. Grow your own food. Make compost. Plant a garden. Be part of the solution, not part of the problem. If you don't, who will? ~ Joseph Jenkins

And that is not all: even if man really were nothing but a piano-key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point. And if he does not find means he will contrive destruction and chaos, will contrive sufferings of all sorts, only to gain his point! He will launch a curse upon the world, and as only man can curse (it is his privilege, the primary distinction between him and other animals), may be by his curse alone he will attain his object--that is, convince himself that he is a man and not a piano-key! If you say that all this, too, can be calculated and tabulated--chaos and darkness and curses, so that the mere possibility of calculating it all beforehand would stop it all, and reason would reassert itself, then man would purposely go mad in order to be rid of reason and gain his point! ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

You have made me ashamed of the wasted years. You have made me acknowledge that no darkness has ever been deep enough to extinguish my personal knowledge of love. And all around me in this world I see evidence of love. I see love. I see it in the human struggle. I see its undeniable penetration in all that humans have accomplished in their poetry, their painting, their music, their love of one another and refusal to accept suffering as their lot. ~ Anne Rice

Art is water, and just as humans are always close to water, for reasons of necessity (to drink, to wash, to flush away, to grow) as well as for reasons of pleasure (to play in, to swim in, to relax in front of, to sail upon, to suck on frozen, coloured and sweetened), so humans must always be close to art in all its incarnations, from the frivolous to the essential. Otherwise we dry up. ~ Yann Martel

The right to have our environment protected for the benefit of present and future generations is our most important human right. ~ Lewis Gordon

Most of us who have been lucky enough to hear, read and see the Dalai Lama, often come away thinking, "What a kind, inspiring and golden human being!" That is true, but I think it does him an injustice. ~ Pico Iyer